MC-MM-MI CARTRIDGES . DO YOU KNOW WHICH HAS BETTER QUALITY PERFORMANCE? REALLY?

I can sit on a wooden bench and listen to music.

Here again I am going to disagree with Raul. Nobody in the store though the Denon sounded better than the Koetsu. Perhaps this was an example of groupthink. The cartridge did not last very long, perhaps more listening would have changed some opinions. 

I suggest @rauliruegas you review oculomotor neuroanatomy and physiology. Our eyes and ears talk to each other, anyone who has experienced vertigo knows this. When the ear gives the brain false spatial information the eyes start bouncing horizontally and the person feels as if the room is spinning. Closing the eyes improves the situation although it does not get rid of it. Visual cues distort the image. Some animals like whales are ruled by their ears. We are ruled by our eyes. Taking the eyes out of the equation by closing them or turning off the lights improves audio image definition. The effect is purely on the image not the amplitude response. I suggest everyone try it. When seriously evaluating a system I always close my eyes. When listening from the listening chair I will always have my eyes closed unless the music is coming from a video. 

Nearfield listening to multiway speakers is not a good way to evaluate a system as you begin to hear the individual drivers. You can do this with headphones and full range drivers but not multiway speakers. By nearfield I mean closer than 3 feet.

Somehow, two different discussions got twisted together, the questions of whether reproduced frequencies above the range of your or my hearing acuity have any effect on your or my perception of music vs whether one should listen with eyes open or closed.  IMO, both questions are more interesting than the question of what type of cartridge Joe Blow of Audiogon Forums likes best. And yet this thread on that subject will go on forever; Raul is a genius at posing open-ended questions that provoke opinions for the sake of having an opinion.

On the first new question, Raul and the published scientific papers he quotes are undeniably correct.  The fact that our sense of SQ is affected by reproduction of frequencies we cannot "hear" by the criterion of audiometry has been shown many times.  This could be due in part to bone conduction or whatever, but it's a fact that I not only accept but am grateful for, since I am old and subject to age-related hf hearing loss. In his white paper on designing preamplifiers, Allen Wright even claimed that he or his listeners could detect a difference in treble response between a circuit that went out to 1 MHz vs a different version that went out to 750KHz, when he experimented with two different configurations of the same preamplifier driving the same downstream system. (That seems a little extreme, even to me.)

On the second new question, I am not sure what is the issue.  No one seems to be saying that eyes open vs eyes closed makes no difference. For sure, it makes a big difference to me in perception of soundstage and location of instruments and distortions produced by the venue or the PA system in any live venue. I experienced this as recently as the last few days when we attended two different live performances, one in a local jazz club and one in a small concert hall which has very good acoustics. At any live venue, I always listen both ways, eyes open vs eyes closed, just to amuse myself but also to get an idea how what I am seeing and listening to might sound if I could only hear it on a home system. My late audiophile friend had an extensive library of DVDs containing live jazz performances.  He had a huge flat screen TV flanked by high end Martin Logan ESLs and driven by quality amplification.  I spent many hours listening with him while we watched the actual performance on the screen.  What happened was I lost nearly all consciousness of or obsession with purely the sound quality.  I was immersed in the experience as if it was happening in front of me.

The Cartridge Topic, where Alll thing being equal is quite important for the determining where best qualities are to be found, and offered with a convincing description.

Has now been met with even more variables, as Dress Code, Lighting, Observation, Seating Position and Seat Material are all entered as factors by the OP.

@mijostyn has attempted to show he has the option to attempt to match the seating as a Wooden Bench is available to be used. A bench might be overkill if the OP is only familiar with a Chair type of seat.

The there is not only the exact positioning of seat in relation to speaker, there is also the posture adopted whilst seated. Legs stretched out to max length, Legs with Bent Knee, Cross Legged. 

Maybe even foot size matters. 

All things being equal, good luck with such an idea, it is bad enough trying to believe all TT's in use are the exact same in their level adjustment. 

I'm struggling with much of what is on offer, as each are very very unique as reports, and I am left trying to conjecture the info to fill in blanks where info is deficient.

The latest parameter to be used as a means of unadulterated assessment is way out there.

I'll let the wider audience decide how rediculous this is to suggest as a requirement beyond the 1st of April. 

It’s just an observation that I came to realize after 50 plus years of playing records using different turntables, arms, phone amps and cartridges. There’s no mechanism involved, just personal experience. Could it be wrong? Maybe…Addressing your other comment, “Good” is arbitrary and hard to define but…what ever you think it is…seems best.

@bsion A lot of phono sections designed for MM cartridges make ticks and pops all on their own due to poor high frequency overload problems. The cartridge has an inductance and that in parallel with the capacitance of the tonearm cable sets up an electrical resonance (a peak like a tone control) that can be up to 20dB, at the upper end of the audio range or just ultrasonic. Keeping the tonearm cable capacitance down pushes this resonance to a higher frequency which is why tonearm cables are usually low capacitance.

There is noise (and sometimes signal, since any stereo cutter has response to well over 40KHz) and boosted in that manner can overload the input of the phono section briefly with a tick or pop as the result.

So you might want to reconsider that idea that the MM cartridges inherently pick up more surface noise- it might simply be you were playing a phono preamp that had this problem; IME this problem is very common. Many solid state MM phono sections in amps and receivers made in the 1970s and 80s had this issue.

@mijostyn  : " seriously evaluating a system I always close my eyes. "

Well that's the way you are accustom to, no problem and maybe when you are in the MUSIC Hall you are sleeping all the time with your eyes closed because in any concert hall not only there is ligth but air conditon noise too and several other issue. Again no problem with.

" a system as you begin to hear the individual drivers. "

Again no problem but you are wrong and not all multidiver speakers and room/system chain performs the same. What's happening with you?

R.